Well now we're cooking with gas. It is that "I/O line passing" mode that I wrongly assumed was present in Series 2. Dammit. That's why I couldn't find ANY examples of what I wanted to do that didn't include an Arduino on one end or the other (but obviously doesn't need to be BOTH, at least).
I'll test that broadcast/coordinator ID chat again soon. I assumed it was going to work and was a bit surprised when it didn't, but didn't dig further. The only settings that had been touched were PAN ID and the Destination addresses, but maybe I screwed something up there and just didn't notice.
I wasn't trusting the pinouts of the Series1 articles in any way, just using them as a guide. I know I connected power/ground correctly from my 2xAA battery pack. The only other thing I connected was on one of them a switch that was pulling an input pin to ground (DIO pin 0 configured as a digital input) and on the other DIO pin 0 was connected to the long leg of an LED with the other end connected to ground and it was configured as "digital output HIGH". I assumed the HIGH/LOW part was just what state to put it in as bootup and that from then it would flip it however it was told to. (And I was using two Sparkfun breakout boards, which have the pinouts labeled where you can see it easily over the breadboard.)
Given that, I can't see how I could have hosed them. I would think it would be especially odd to hose them such that they both APPEARED to work fine as far as XCTU was concerned but simply wouldn't talk over the radio. I would have assumed total annihilation, or just for the input/output pin itself to quit working. But obviously with these things anything is possible, I guess.
So my application is pretty simple. I'd like to make a long range gate trigger. I could probably drop back and punt to Series1 devices, but I was hoping to use Series2 in case I need to put a router in to extend my range. I own a lot of property BEFORE you get to the gate I want to trigger (which only needs to close a relay on the receiving side, so that's dead simple), so I could get a router further out. Basically the gate is SLOW and I'm impatient. I can actually open the stupid thing with my cellphone already, but that's not reliable due to cell coverage in the area.
And I was HOPING to do it without an Arduino in the mix, since it's really a simple button press on one end to flip a relay on the other. I'm guessing I can still do it, but it sounds like it's a good bit more involved using Series 2, and may be easier to just add the Arduino on the receiving end (I do want to have multiple senders and was planning to add the encryption layer for security).
--Donnie